Rear suspension clunking noise

Hello all, I have what seems to be a common problem with these cars on my sons 96' Contour. The dreaded clunking noise in the rear suspension. We bought the car from the previous owner who had just put new rear struts, strut mounts, and sway bar end links on. Everything was fine for a while. However, after he had put about 10,000 miles on it, we started noticing a clunking sound that has progressivley gotten worse. After crawling all over the back end of this car, trying to find something loose, I have finally found that the nuts that hold the strut to the upper mount have backed off enough to make this noise. My questions to anyone out there that has had this problem are:

1. Can I tighten them up without taking the struts out of the car?
2. If so, is there a proper torque for these nuts?
3. What size is the nut anyway? I haven't been able to the right socket to fit them.

Thanks to anyone who can provide me with detailed information to get this taken care of.

due to the clearance in the trunk you will be hard pressed to tighten the nuts with the struts still in the car. The rear struts arent difficult to remove so I would recommend spending the time to remove them and then tighten the nuts down properly. I cant remember what the torque is supposed to be but its basically about as tight as you will be able to get it while holding the strut from turning with the small wrench or allen key on top.

It's doubtful that you can tighten those nuts up while the struts are in the car. If it can be done, it will take a specialty tool that is part socket / part wrench so that you can slip an Allen wrench down the center of the socket and into the strut shaft.

The manual claims the torque is 50 Newton-meters which is the same as 37 ft-lbs.

The size of the nut depends on whether the struts are OEM or aftermarket. For example, the SVT OEM struts used 18 mm nuts on my car but the Bilsteins I'm putting in use 19 mm nuts.

Ok, that's what it looked like to me also. Just wanted to make sure. Thanks for the info.